Once I got back the TARDIS was empty. Remembering the episode, I tried the rooftop.
I climbed up the stairs and opened the door that led to the roof and there they were. I walked up to them, and Rose noticed my new look.
"New outfit?" she looked me up and down then smiled. "It suits you."
The Doctor didn't comment but he also grinned.
Then, as if it was waiting for us to finish, the sky tore open.
Not literally of course. The sound hit us first: a low roar, growing fast, like a jet at the wrong altitude. People started coming out onto balconies, shading their eyes, phones already in their hands.
The Doctor looked up, eyes going wide.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, that's not right."
I followed his gaze.
Something was streaking over London. Big and bright. It clipped past tower blocks, trailing smoke, banked hard—and headed straight toward the river.
"Is that a plane?" someone yelled.
"That is not a plane," the Doctor breathed.
"That's a spaceship."
We watched it slice across the sky toward the Thames.
Someone screamed.
"That was Big Ben!" another voice shouted. "It hit Big Ben!"
The Doctor's whole posture changed. Domestic guilt, gone. This was the bit he understood.
"Well," he said. "That's new."
Phones were out everywhere now, everyone shouting, filming, talking at once. Jackie and Rose appeared back on the balcony, faces pale, staring at the rising plume of smoke.
I looked at them, then at the Doctor.
"Let me guess," I said. "You want to go poke the crash site."
He grinned, almost despite himself.
"Of course," he said. "Spaceship over London? That's like a summons with my name on it."
"Doctor!" Rose called down. "Did you see that? Tell me that's them. That's aliens, isn't it?"
"Oh, definitely aliens," he called back. "Question is: what kind?"
"And question two," I added, "who just staged all of this, and why?"
He glanced at me, interest sparking properly now.
"You think it's staged?" he asked.
"Oh please. This is my bread and butter. I recognise a working machine even if I see it for the first time," I said as I was looking at the ship heading for the Thames.
"That is a perfectly functional ship, simply flying toward the river to land, while the crew set one of the engine compartments on fire to fake enough damage for those who don't know any better. What a lazy work…"
"It's fake?" Rose asked, confused. "But why would they do that?"
The Doctor's grin sharpened.
"All right," he said. "Let's go find out."
He bolted for the TARDIS.
"Doctor!" Rose shouted. "Wait for me!"
"Stay with your mum," he shouted back, already halfway inside. "We'll be back."
Rose swallowed.
"We'll be back in a bit," I said to her. "We don't know who the aliens are or what they want after this stunt, could be dangerous, so wait here."
I then ran after the Doctor.
"Hospital first," the Doctor said, already spinning dials. "There'll be a hospital. Always is. Alien body, human curiosity, cameras. Somewhere in Central London, some poor porter is wheeling something very strange into a sterile room."
"And if this is a hoax," I said, "whatever's on that slab is going to be the punchline."
I gripped the console as the engines wound up again.
***
Albion Hospital looked exactly like every hospital I'd ever seen: too much white with not enough fresh air, and an atmosphere of pure depression. How they always manage that I don't know. It must be a universal law or something.
The TARDIS had dropped us neatly in an out-of-the-way storeroom, tucked behind a pile of unused drip stands. From there, it was easy enough to follow the flow of people.
"Nice landing," I murmured.
"She's learning," the Doctor murmured back, patting the wall.
We got out and passed nurses, soldiers and men in suits all talking at once into various phones.
Looks like we didn't land next to the soldiers' restroom. Convenient, I'll take it.
We rounded a corner. Ahead, a double door marked RESTRICTED ACCESS stood guarded by two soldiers trying very hard to look like they weren't terrified.
The Doctor strode straight up to them.
"Hello," he said brightly. "We're here about the alien."
The taller soldier tightened his grip on his rifle.
"This area's off-limits, sir," he said.
The Doctor fished in his pocket, flipped open a blank piece of card and showed it to them.
The soldier stared at it, blinked, frowned—then snapped to attention.
"Sorry, sir," he said to the Doctor. "I didn't recognise you."
"Few people do," the Doctor said cheerfully, taking the card back. He jerked his head toward the door. "We're wasting time."
The soldier hit the release. The doors slid open.
Inside, a small crowd of medical staff, military, and one very harassed administrator clustered around an observation window looking down into a surgical theatre.
In the theatre below, under bright lights, something lay covered by a green sheet on a gurney.
"Right then," the Doctor said softly. "Let's have a look at our little visitor."
We edged toward the glass.
The administrator spotted us.
"Excuse me," he said sharply. "This is a secured area. Who authorised—"
The Doctor flashed the psychic paper again.
"I did," he said. "I'm the Doctor. That's the Engineer. We're with… whatever's in charge of alien stuff this week."
The man squinted, then deflated.
"Oh," he said. "Right. Sorry. We've been waiting for someone like you lot to turn up. Been madness here since they brought it in."
He turned back to the glass.
"Crashed into the river, they say," he went on. "Barely got it out before the current took it. Thing was still breathing when they wheeled it in. Well. Sort of breathing."
"Can we see it?" I asked.
As if on cue, the surgeon in the theatre nodded to someone off-screen. The sheet was lifted.
Small, pink, four-legged, with a little curly tail. Also a breathing mask strapped over its snout, tubing running into its chest, and a thick cable coiled along its spine into some crude control unit.
"Oh," the Doctor said quietly. "Oh, that's cruel."
Up close, my senses picked out the rest. Augmented neural pathways, heavy tampering along the spine, lungs reinforced just enough to survive a crash and not one second longer.
"This isn't an alien," I said. "It's a farm animal in fancy dress."
"Farm animal?" one of the resident staff members whispered to another. "Someone dressed a pig up as an alien and crashed it into Big Ben?"
Below, the pig twitched.
It lurched upright suddenly, legs flailing, confused and terrified. Tubes ripped free. The staff in the theatre panicked; one nurse screamed as it stumbled off the table and bolted for the door like a drunk toddler.
"Move," the Doctor snapped.
We were already running.
***
The corridor outside the theatre rang with the sudden wail of alarms. A door flew open ahead of us; the pig burst out, eyes wide, head tossing, squealing in blind panic.
"Oi!" the Doctor yelled, sprinting after it. "Come here, you!"
The pig skidded around a corner, hooves sliding on linoleum, slammed into a crash trolley and sent a stack of metal trays clattering.
We turned the corner just in time to see it barrel straight toward a line of armed soldiers.
"Don't shoot!" the Doctor shouted.
One of them flinched, gun going off. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space.
The pig went down hard, sliding on its side until it came to rest against the far wall.
For a moment, nobody moved.
The Doctor dropped to his knees beside it.
"Stupid, stupid apes," he muttered. "You didn't have to—"
I knelt opposite him, putting a hand gently on the pig's side.
It was still alive for the moment. Heart pounding, lungs spasming in fear and pain and confusion.
"Can you save it?" the Doctor whispered to me.
"Too much damage," I said. "Spine's cooked. Lungs torn. Whatever they did to it, it was never meant to live long. Just long enough to be seen."
The Doctor met my eyes over the little body.
"A joke," he said. "All of this. A stunt."
He stroked the pig's head once, gently. Its breathing slowed.
"We're sorry," he said. "We're so sorry."
It shuddered once, then went still.
I exhaled.
The corridor smelled of cordite and antiseptic and something faintly like burned bacon.
Behind us, the soldier who'd fired the shot lowered his gun, face pale.
"I didn't know," he said hoarsely. "I thought—"
"I know what you thought," the Doctor said, standing up slowly. "You thought you'd be a hero. You shot a frightened pig."
The man flinched.
"Who would do this?" the staff member who'd run after us asked. "Who'd… make all this? The crash, the ship, a fake alien, all of it?"
"Someone who wants Earth scared and looking the wrong way," I said. "Someone who knows exactly how your government will react to a big, public, harmless crisis."
The Doctor's jaw tightened.
"And someone who thinks I'll come running to have a look," he said. "Experts, that's what they'll want. UNIT, Torchwood, MOD, everyone who's ever had a file with 'ALIEN' stamped on it. And me."
He jabbed a finger at the nearest CCTV camera, little red light blinking.
"Smile," he said grimly. "You're on government watch-list."
The administrator from the observation room appeared at the end of the corridor, flushed and breathless.
"What happened?" he demanded. Then he saw the pig. "Oh. Oh, dear Lord."
The Doctor stalked toward him.
"That ship," he said. "The crash. The debris. You've analysed it?"
"O-of course," the man stammered. "Recovered it just after impact. Our people say it's alien, no doubt about it. Fantastic opportunity for—"
"It was launched from Earth," I cut in. "Same metals, same welds, same fuels. Someone built it here. Someone staged your big day out."
The man stared.
"That's impossible," he said. "We saw it—"
"You saw what they wanted you to see," the Doctor said. "They built a fake, stuffed an animal in the pilot seat and threw it at your Parliament."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because nothing gets humans to panic like a visible threat and the promise of simple answers," the Doctor said. "And while you're all glued to the telly, whoever's behind this gets to slip in the back door."
He ran a hand through his hair, agitated.
"They'll be convening everyone by now," he said. "Cabinet, security council, military. And they'll want every so-called alien expert on the planet in one room, so they can show off their new toy."
He looked at me.
"I've visited this planet a lot over the centuries," he said. "Left a few footprints. Files. Rumours."
"And now they've gone through their records," I finished, "and realised there's one name that keeps turning up whenever something weird falls out of the sky."
He gave a humourless little smile.
"Who's the biggest expert?" he said. "That'll be me."
"And I'm apparently the one who keeps the big blue box running," I said. "So we're both invited."
The TARDIS hummed faintly at the edge of my awareness, ready for the next move.
"Politics," I muttered. "My favourite."
We stood there for one more moment over the small, stupid, tragic hoax on the floor.
Then the Doctor straightened his coat.
"Right," he said. "Spaceships, dead pigs, mysterious invitations. Feels like a Downing Street sort of day."
He turned toward the exit.
I followed. We picked up Rose and I explained to her what we found out.
"So what are we going to do now?" she asked the Doctor.
"Well," he said. "Let's go see what kind of alien thinks this is funny."
They entered the TARDIS and I followed after them a second later.
The Engineer, apparently, had a front-row seat.